Throwback Thursday: 1967-70 Whiteland baseball

Four county high schools have won at least four consecutive baseball sectionals at one time or another; that trend was started by the 1967 Whiteland Warriors.

In an era best described as the height of single-class athletics in Indiana, coach Larry Bledsoe’s teams qualified to play in the Bloomington Regional, but never advanced further.

In 1967, Whiteland lost to host Bloomington (which didn’t split into South and North until the 1972-73 school year) in a semifinal. The 1968 squad came close to making the championship game at night, but lost a 2-1 heartbreaker to Spencer.

Neither the 1969 or 1970 Warriors made it past the regional semifinals, either, but Bledsoe still remembers that stretch with great fondness.

“I was blessed with good baseball players and good kids at that time. We just had so many good position players and pitchers, we were fortunate,” said Bledsoe, now 83 and living in Bloomington. “It was a very baseball-oriented community, from Little League on up. The kids were coachable and they loved the game.”

The 1967 Warriors, now regarded as groundbreakers of sorts, were led by the pitching of senior Rex Fleming and junior Tim Bayless. Senior third baseman John Owens, who won 12 varsity athletic letters at Whiteland, was also instrumental in the team’s success.

“We didn’t have a lot of sluggers. We had guys who hit the ball hard, just not home run hitters,” remembers Jody Corbin, 69, a junior on that first sectional-winning squad who a year later teamed with Bayless to form one of the area’s top pitching combinations.

“Coach Bledsoe wouldn’t let us lay down or quit. If we got behind, he let it be known that wasn’t acceptable.”

Former Whiteland baseball coach and athletic director Butch Zike, a junior catcher during the 1967 season, said Whiteland — then a small school with an approximate enrollment of 450 students — benefited from being part of the Mid-Hoosier Conference with, among others, Edinburgh, Hauser, Southwestern and Waldron.

The league played summer ball games in June and July over the summers of 1966 and 1967, the Mid-Hoosier baseball teams facing each other for home-and-home competitions every Monday and Thursday.

Another factor was Bledsoe, a native of French Lick, who was 25 when he became the school’s baseball coach before the start of the 1960-61 school year. He came to Whiteland from Center Grove, where he did his student teaching and also coached after graduating from Indiana Central University (now the University of Indianapolis).

“That team, we were so far ahead of everybody else in the county in baseball because we played all summer together, and then in the springtime, too,” Zike said. “And we had coach Bledsoe. Even now, he’s not Larry, he’s coach Bledsoe. It made no difference if you were the best player or the worst player, he treated you the same and brought out the best in you.

“He was a winner. When people told me we were going to have a bad season, I thought we might lose four or five games. That came from him. We expected to win.”

Bledsoe left Whiteland following the 1969-70 school year to become baseball coach at Northwood Institute, then an NAIA school in West Baden. The chance to return to the area he was raised in was too good for Bledsoe to pass up.

“It was an opportunity to go back to my roots and to coach college baseball,” he said. “I was happy at Whiteland, but it was time to move on. There comes a time when you need to try something new, especially when you’re young.”

Zike said the Whiteland Little League, founded years earlier and run by Ben Gunn, played a significant role in the community’s love of baseball. Success usually followed the players all the way through high school, and even onto college baseball diamonds.

Bayless and Tom Lawrence, the Warriors’ top two pitchers for the 1968 squad that repeated as sectional champion, played at East Carolina and Stetson, respectively. First baseman John Means eventually played a season of baseball at Purdue, but he first was a linebacker for the Boilermakers football. Zike played baseball at Franklin College.

There were other Whiteland starters from those teams talented enough to play college baseball had they chose to go that route, Zike said.

In time, the Warriors’ feat of four straight sectional titles was duplicated, first by Greenwood (1975-78), and most recently by Indian Creek, which is still in the midst of an active run after securing Class 3A titles from 2016-19.

Only one local baseball program has picked up five consecutive sectional championships — coach Dave Gandolph’s Center Grove squads from 1989-93.

But there was only one first, and Corbin feels fortunate to have been part of it.

“Pretty much all of us grew up in the area,” he said. “We played Little League together and our parents knew one another. It was almost family, and we took care of one another. We would go outside, play baseball, and we played all day.”